Worldwide air traffic is projected to double every ten to fourteen years and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) forecasts world air travel growth of five percent per annum until the year 2020. Such growth may have an influence on flight performance and may increase the workload of the flight crew. One such influence on flight performance has been the ability for the flight crew to determine appropriate Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) flight routes or alternate IFR procedures while paying attention to other matters within and outside of the cockpit, especially for approach to landing and departures from takeoff, which are probably the most challenging tasks a pilot undertakes during normal operation. The ability to easily and quickly make the proper determination of alternate IFR procedures can significantly improve situational awareness of the flight crew resulting in increased flight safety and performance by reducing the flight crew workload. An increase in pilot workload typically results in an increase in cognitive errors and a decreased attention span: the pilot must interpret and integrate the information provided from several sources occupying his thought processes when he may have many other decisions to make.
As terminal area operations increase in aircraft volume throughput, complexity, and required execution precision, pilots need to select the proper approach or departure procedure from what may be several dozen possible selections. For example, the Paris airport Le Bourget has approximately 125 approach procedures and 72 departure procedures.
Conventionally, a pilot would maintain copies of printed charts of approaches and departures and utilize the proper chart during flight. After identifying the proper chart, the pilot would locate the appropriate approach or departure that corresponds to the intended flight path of the aircraft. The published charts are oriented north-up and often require a pilot to manually rotate and position the chart to orient it based on the current heading of the aircraft. Additionally, these charts often included a variety of other information relating to the given navigational facility, further obfuscating the desired minimum safe altitude and maximum safe distance information. Thus, using and maintaining the printed charts is both cumbersome and confusing.
However, electronic instrumentation displays have generally replaced paper charts and continue to advance in sophistication, achieving increasingly higher levels of information density and, consequently, presenting a greater amount of visual information to be perceived and understood by the operator, e.g., the pilot. It is important that visual displays provide a proper cognitive mapping between what the operator is trying to achieve and the information available to accomplish the task.
Airport Moving Maps (AMM) are an overlay, for example, on a multi-function display/inertial navigation display (MFD/INAV), where approaches and departures may be shown on the display.
Data driven charts (DDC) have a powerful ability to integrate chart information with aircraft position and flight management system (FMS) procedural routing. This is a very crisp and concise way of presenting terrain and chart information especially around an airport terminal area.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system and method for graphically displaying approaches and departures that may be easily understood by the pilot. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the exemplary embodiments will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.